Whenever a movie like Neighbors comes out, studio people inevitably try to compare it to memorable comedy classics of years past, movies of theoretically the same ilk – Caddyshack, Back to School, Stripes, Animal House, Billy Madison etc. etc. Movies that are well loved, but that weren’t particularly ambitious from a plot standpoint. Movies where there’s no “big question” the writer is trying to answer for himself or discovery to be made about the human condition (they’ll never compare a movie like Neighbors to an Albert Brooks movie, say). The film is mostly just a vehicle for putting funny people in funny situations. Plot-as-clown-car movies, call them. Ha, look at Bill Murray trying to bathe that cat!

Nothing wrong with that, but if your goal is putting funny people in funny situations, Zac Efron is just taking up space. He’s an adequate actor and totally f*ckable for both sexes, but you’re not getting a lot of comedic ROI. Mostly the funny comes at him, rather than from him. Like the line about him looking like he was built in a lab by gay scientists (great line). Secondly, even an unambitious comedy has to execute, and a key element of comedy is surprise. What’s the opposite of surprise? An unspoken checklist of scenes and jokes I expected to see that the film proceeds to tick off one by one:

The cutesy bromance scene (formerly the gay panic scene, this now involves dudes being comically earnest with their affections – see: Superbad).

The slow motion, ironic “cool guy” tracking shot set to some nineties rap song (see: smashing the copier set to the Geto Boys in Office Space). Get it? It’s hilarious because the song is cool and black, but the people are dorky and white! Also, remember that one song??

Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne walking up to a frat house in slo-mo set to “Here Comes the Hotstepper…” Melissa McCarthy doing the robot in slo-mo in Tammy… Hey, you know what makes for great comedy?? A totally interchangeable nothing scene that can be equally mediocre in any movie!

Universal Pictures

This isn’t to say that the comedy in Neighbors is too vulgar or too dumb. For me there can be no such thing. I love dumb comedy. There’s an intellectual bravery at the root of dumb comedy that it never gets credit for, having the courage to put your silliest pleasures out there for the world, judgements be damned. “Dare to be Stupid,” as the philosopher Weird Al Yankovic once wrote. Trouble is, people tend to confuse dumb comedy with hacky comedy. Where dumb comedy is guileless, hacky comedy is calculating. A shrewd, needy act of trying to reuse others’ thoughts in order to usurp their validation. If dumb comedy is a child discovering armpit farts, hacky comedy is a serial killer wearing someone else’s skin because he thought she was pretty. They’re diametrically opposed. I can’t laugh at you pooping if it feels like you’re trying to kill me.

Neighbors is basically a handful of good, dumb jokes swimming in a hacky premise. There are funny things in it, like Dave Franco’s character being able to will himself tumescent as a party trick (great bit), but it’s not a funny story. It’s not even a story, really.

There’s a difference between a loose plot that you can have fun with and a loose plot that the actors entertain themselves by constantly jumping out of, which is what Neighbors is. It has way too many riffy two shots where the characters have no real motivation and it’s transparently just two actors trying to amuse each other. This is nothing against riffing or improvised dialog in general. Take a show like Curb Your Enthusiasm, which is built on improvised dialog. The difference is that in Curb, within the improvisation, each character has a motivation. The interaction still has a specific point to get across, within the story. In Neighbors, certain improvised sections have no real purpose other than as an excuse to show that “Hey, Ike Barinholtz can do a real good Obama impression!” He can, but there’s no build to that, and it has nothing to do with the story. Also, are you doing improvisational comedy or producing a sixth grade talent show?

Speaking of no build, there are lot of jokes in Neighbors that don’t land because it feels like a character’s backstory got lost in the editing room. Hannibal Burress, one of my favorite comedians in real life, plays a cop character who’s this confusing mish-mash of quirks and conflicting motivations. He wants to… uh… be mean to people… and… eat a sandwich? Another great comic, Jerrod Carmichael, plays a frat bro who… uh… gets his pubes ripped out? Chris Mintz-Plasse is there solely so they can reference his character having a big dick. By the way, why am I watching the High School Musical kid improv while the actual comedy people do nothing but anchor dicks?

Sometimes for a scene as a whole to be funny, you need a cop, not a “funny cop.” Even Ken Jeong, king of the over actors, was funny as the doctor in Knocked Up, because he played him as “put upon doctor,” not as “Ken Jeong playing a doctor.” When you’re building a comedy house, sometimes you just have to sort of stack the bricks. Neighbors wants to skip the stacking part so it can wink at the camera and rub its balls all over the bricks. That can be intermittently funny, but at the end of the day, I’d rather have a house than a pile of bricks that smells like balls.

Al’s a northern gal, which means she needs a man who looks like he can build a house and kill a bear, that they might take refuge from the cold in its guts. Plus some girth doesn’t hurt, as it makes them famine resistant to those cold winters and a vital source of heat.

What you said there in that last paragraph is the problem I always had with Superbad. I loved Superbad, but Rogen and Bill Hader’s cops? Worst part of the movie.
They needed to play them straighter. That’s what keeps the Rogen-Franco crew from being the greatest comedy wizards of all time – they just don’t get when to rein it in.

I may get hate, but rewatch all those. Billy Madison does not belong with the rest. Very mediocre, and I say that as someone who graduated high school in 98. Happy Gilmore is wayyy more hilarious/ re-watchable.

Chris Farley wasn’t funny. Ever. The only funny thing he was involved in from this movie was when he tries to lie about sleeping with the girl and Sandler say “That never happened”. But it was less about Farley being funny than it was about clever writing and Sandler’s delivery.

Chris Farley is right up there with Kurt Cobain and a few other young celebs who committed suicide – extremely overrated performers who found fame during a down time in their respective entertainment fields, where there was a void that needed to be filled with something, anything, who in retrospect really wasn’t very talented at all, but who lives on as legend because of their tragic, stupid, selfish deaths.

That’s the movie. Right there. It’s actually a pretty well-done movie about a character who is incredibly stupid, and maybe the one time outside of Punch Drunk Love Sandler’s bothered to do anything with his talent.

@Underball: dude. Farley. Fat guy in a little coat. In a van down by the river. Cinching it with a belt. Not so much here or here really, but riiighht here.
The man was freakin hysterical and his death was a tragic loss to comedy.

@Underball: I don’t deny that a lot of the comedy/comedians/ comedic actors that I enjoy aren’t exactly highbrow. That’s exactly why I DO like them- escapism. Just funny for fun’s sake. I can’t say they made an impact “in” my sense of humor though.

Escapism is perfectly fine, and in the case you describe – makes complete sense. I just wouldn’t go confusing that with brilliance or genius or anything. I like lots of stupid shit. I know it’s stupid, but I like it anyway. I don’t try to convince other people they are wrong for them not liking it though.

Great review Vince, and I see all of these symptoms in all the post Apatow comedies now a days. There are lots of scenes where it’s obvious they just improvised and it wasn’t that great but fuck it we’re calling it a day. You compare these movies to Stripes or Blazing Saddles and there’s really no comparison, they just come off as half assed.

There is just one part of your review that confused me: “If dumb comedy is a child discovering armpit farts, hacky comedy is a serial killer wearing someone else’s skin because he thought she was pretty. They’re diametrically opposed. I can’t laugh at you pooping if it feels like you’re trying to kill me.” Mind expanding on that? I kind of got lost.

Weird, I thought I expanded more on that than anything else in this review. Basically, I see dumb comedy as the innocence of discovering fart jokes, whereas hacky comedy is less an innocent discovery than it is observing the world and learning how to manipulate people. Dumb comedy is the creator trying to amuse himself, hacky comedy is mimickry in the hopes of producing a reaction in someone else, if that makes any sense. The old “I just… want… to fit in!”

It’s funny you say that, because there is an honest-to-god argument in the movie where Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen both say they should get to be Kevin James because neither one wants to act like the grown up in situation.

I cannot maintain the suspension of disbelief it would require to get through this movie, becase I don’t care what kind of Hollywood fantasy world people would prefer to live in, There’s no wany in any infinite number of alternate universes that a schlub like Rogen would ever score a perfect woman like Rose Byrne.

@Dan. Exactly. That overarching premise right off the bat keeps me away from movies like this, even though I want to like it and I know there is some ‘funny’ scattered through it.

At least try to put it in the framework of reality so the actualy comedy is, well, comedic. Maybe a better idea would have been recently married couple with newborn move to a college town due to a job transfer and unknowingly buy a house next to a frat.

@Underball Yet we don’t get nudity from Zac. See how it isn’t fair? And I’d still probably agree with Rose. She almost has an anti-Hollywood body at times – she almost has curves (and a great backside).

You rated it higher than I did, Vince. My biggest issues were that this seemed like a “bunch of scenes” tacked together without a coherent narrative AND that the tone of the comedy jumped all over the place. Some slapstick, some wordplay, some gross-out, some meta, a whole lot of flaccid improv and padding. Plus some out-of-place semi-serious “relationship” stuff.

DON’T EVER BE AFRAID TO GO FULL ANIMAL HOUSE and yet, that’s what they did here.

I predict a decent opening weekend and then a precipitous decline when people figure out it just ISN’T funny.

The complaints you have about Neighbors were exactly the kinds of things I assumed would be in This Is The End — leading me to avoid it in the theaters. But I caught in on Netflix sometime later and loved it — and was really surprised at how a movie made up of what seemed like a ton of throwaway scenes still had a narrative that felt like an actual conflict

My question is — if this movie is basically a less star-studded copy of that template, what makes one attempt at it work and the other fail?

Is it the quality of the people involved in the improv scenes, or the editing that decided to keep scenes that might have had funny moments but didn’t really maintain the central premise of the movie?

Or is it that I was more willing to accept Seth Rogen playing Seth Rogan versus this movie where Seth Rogan is playing “A dad character?”

What makes that one work and this one fail, I think, is that that one started with a funnier idea, and had Rogen and Goldberg on as writer/directors, so that there was a guidance to the improv stuff. This one doesn’t feel like it has as strong a creative hand telling the actors to stop dicking around and get back to the point. Also, I think This is the End is an inherently funnier idea, where as Neighbors is more of a blank slight that requires finding an angle, which it never really does (it does flirt with one at times).

This movie should be watched in 10 minute chunks when it is on cable or something. There are some laughs throughout but as a feature it falls flat because it feels disjointed and the characters are too inconsistent. Rose Byrne makes out with a college girl, though, which is always a good thing.

I have to give Verbral Kunt a comment because his description of it is right on point. Every 10 mins or so I was laughing pretty hard and then crickets, and then laughing..rinse repeat. But that GD baby was so damn adorable and it reminded me of my niece (that cute expressive pudgy face) and I just couldn’t stop from smiling.

I had a similar problem with Project X. Cops would’ve showed up far sooner, broke up the party, and the hilarity could have continued in a more realistic way, but instead we got a teenage fantasy that completely lost me. I agree with your sentiments on the improvisational aspect, all players working together to form a natural resolution, rather than just a playground for ridiculousness with no payoff. Too many comedies have no purpose these days, and the Apatow crew is highly to blame. Each movie is like a comedian trying out bits, and every once in a while it hits or the ideas form great jokes, but we’re ultimately paying to test their products.

In all fairness, that time I happened upon my cousin wearing the skin of his recently slaughtered high school crush (obsession?) was really funny. Granted, you had to know the people involved, timing was a factor, and he could do the voice pretty well, but I laugh every time I think back on it.

Too bad this turned out mediocre but honestly, did you expect anything else from a film with Zac Efron? His peak was High School Musical, sadly. I do love Seth and not going to lie, Zac shirtless is hot, but neither of things could ever make this movie good. With that said, I’m looking forward to what Seth has to bring (as I am assuming he’ll carry the film) and oogling Zac shirtless whenever possible.